Claude Muncaster (1903-1974)

Claude Grahame Muncaster, RWS, ROI, RBA, SMA was the son of Oliver Hall RA. At the age of fifteen his career as a landscape painter began, and he soon took to the seas, spending the 1920s and 30s travelling the world with his sketchbook in a series of vessels. With the outbreak of war and he joined the RNVR training as a navigator. Having left school at fifteen his mathematics was very weak and it was a relief for all when his artistic talents meant he was recruited as a camofleur. A master of capturing seascapes he was therefore able to hide huge ships ‘in plain sight’ with clever disguises. After the war he painted for the Royal Family and was a frequent guest at Sandringham.

Claude Muncaster was a watercolourist known for his landscapes and maritime scenes. He was born Grahame Hall, the son of the Royal Academician Oliver Hall who taught his son to paint from an early age; Grahame first exhibited his work aged 15 and a few years later was showing at the RA. However, he adopted the name Claude Muncaster in 1922 to dissociate his career from that of his father.

Muncaster’s primary choice of subject matter came from a genuine love of the sea. He made several long-distance sea voyages, including one around the Horn as a deckhand in the windjammer Olivebank in 1931, which he described in ‘Rolling Round the Horn’, published in 1933. Armed with a sketchbook, his aim was to be able to ‘paint ships and the sea with greater authority’. This he certainly achieved, perfectly capturing the limpid first light of morning over the Port of Aden, the choppy rain-grey waters of the Bay of Biscay and a streak of sunlight through gathering storm clouds at dusk in Exeter. He became an Associate of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1931 and was a founder member, and later President, of the Royal Society of Marine Artists.

During the Second World War, Muncaster served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) from 1940-44, training as a navigator before going on to advise on the camouflage of ships, and also worked as an official war artist. In ‘Still Morning at Aden’ (1944) he depicts Allied warships in this safe anchorage in the Middle East; the back is stamped with Admiralty approval.

In 1946-7 he was commissioned by the Queen to produce watercolours of the royal residences at Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral; the Duke of Edinburgh, in a foreword to a biography of Muncaster, recalls looking at these and considering the artist’s ‘unerring instinct for a subject’, his sense of atmosphere. Other commissions included large panoramas of the Thames and of Bradford. His career also included work as an etcher, illustrator, writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and his paintings can be found in the Royal Academy, Tate, National Maritime Museum Cornwall, National Railway Museum and Royal Air Force Museum.